In Part 1 of this post, I discussed the "what" of America's moron problem. In this Part 2, I discuss the "why". I argue that morons in America are made, not born. Looking at the record of the Republican Party since the launch of Richard Nixon's "Southern Strategy" in 1972, I describe a Party that has spent decades cultivating a voting base of morons to serve its interests, only to lose that base to Donald Trump in 2016. Trump has now taken over the RNC as well as its base, and is in the process of bleeding the Party dry to fund his many criminal trials. Should Republicans suffer the catastrophic defeat Trump seems to be preparing for them, Democrats will have an opportunity to undo the deficiencies in our democracy that led to Trump and the rise of politically-motivated MAGA morons in America. Whether Democrats will take that opportunity remains to be seen.
Reasoning does not come naturally to humans, it must be learned
For 99% of our time on this planet, humans have led a pretty simple life. Wandering the savannah in small bands, we spent our days gathering berries and hunting big animals, and our nights making more humans. Some amount of reasoning and logical if-then thinking was required, but not that much.
Today, we look back at the rise of science and the scientific method — the birth of The Enlightenment — as one of the greatest achievements of humankind. But we tend to forget that this radical new way of thinking took centuries to develop, was strongly resisted by the most powerful institutions of the day, and never really penetrated beyond the most privileged classes of the most prosperous countries, at least not until the widespread adoption of public education in the early 20th Century.
Thinking is hard work. Rational, logical thinking is even harder. Daniel Kahneman, winner of the 2002 Nobel Prize for Economics, summarized why this is so in his best-selling book Thinking, Fast and Slow. Kahneman describes two very distinct decision making systems that operate in the human brain, which he labels System 1 and System 2.
System 1 can be thought of as our default decision-making system. It is fast, effortless, and operates largely outside of conscious awareness. It ignores ambiguity and suppresses doubt. It is, in Kahneman's apt phrase, "a machine for jumping to conclusions". Its evolutionary purpose is basically to keep us alive. If we spot a snake in the grass, we jump first. That's System 1 in action. Later, after we calm down, we may ask whether it really was a snake. That's a question that enlists System 2 thinking.
Unlike System 1, System 2 is slow, effortful, and able to handle only one thing at a time. It utilizes logical or propositional thinking, combining if-then logic with a person's knowledge of the world to develop expectations, make predictions, and draw conclusions. If System 1 is for getting things done, System 2 is for thinking about getting things done, for deliberating. Kahneman describes System 2 as the brain's "lazy controller". It intervenes and interrupts System 1, but not always. When it does, it pulls us back from automatically jumping to conclusions. It is the mode of thinking we deploy when we consider a choice situation coldly, critically, and logically. (I discuss Kahneman's dual-system model and its relevance to human decision making in much more detail in my book, Intuitive Marketing, chapter 1 and passim).
Reasoning is the process by which we reach conclusions based on evidence. It engages System 2 and is neither easy nor natural. That is why people who must reason for a living undergo years of education.
If you want to become a doctor, lawyer, or physicist, you must first learn how to think like a doctor, lawyer, or physicist.
It's hard, many try and fail along the way.
So reasoning does not come naturally. It must be learned, which means it must be taught. And it must be taught to everyone, not just doctors, lawyers, and physicists. What happens if it is never taught, never learned, or simply rejected as somehow suspect (aka "woke")? If you live in the USA in the early 21st Century, you end up believing in Donald Trump. You end up believing in MAGA. And you end up in the company of millions of other Americans who are unable or unwilling to recognize that Donald Trump is an unfit and incompetent moron who is less qualified to be President of the United States than I am qualified to perform brain surgery.
Reasoning versus magical thinking
Because thinking critically and independently about the world around us is difficult, humans often find it easier to retreat into a fantasy world populated by ghosts, superstitions, and imaginary friends, like Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, or God(s).
If you doubt this, consider just a few of the ways magical thinking permeates the modern world. Do you believe in astrology, or maybe just read your horoscope once in awhile? Have you ever been to a fortune teller? Do you suspect that haunted houses, ghosts, angels, or divine intervention might be real? Do you believe in miracles? Luck? Reincarnation? Do you believe the Catholic communion wafer is the literal body of Christ? Do you believe in heaven and hell? These are all examples of magical thinking. They are so thoroughly woven into the fabric of our daily lives that we barely notice how bizarre they are. To embrace any or all of these beliefs is essentially to abandon evidence-based reasoning for blind faith, because there is simply no reliable evidence supporting any of them.
What we have learned over centuries is that most people prefer blind faith and magical thinking to evidence-based reasoning. It's easier, more comforting, and usually much more socially acceptable. It prioritizes feelings, which are easily activated, over facts, which are stubbornly hard to ignore. The downside of blind faith is that it leaves the faithful vulnerable to manipulation and exploitation by unscrupulous leaders.
This is exactly what is happening in the United States today.
The Moron Machine: The Republican Party groomed a following to serve its interests, then lost them all to Donald Trump
Morons, as I've defined them here, are made, not born. And in America, the approximately 40 million morons threatening our democracy today are all products, directly or indirectly, of a Republican Party that has embraced, exploited, and amplified their prejudices and biases ever since the Party decided to get into the racism business back in the 1970s.
The story of the Republican Party's descent into fascism, "light treason", and a cult of personality, is fairly well known. It begins with Nixon's "Southern Strategy", which aligned the GOP with what polite society calls "Southern white racial anxiety", a delicate condition that arises only when one's belief in the natural superiority of the white race appears threatened.
Racism is the original sin of the Republican Party. Once it hung out its "Racists Welcome!" sign, it quickly swept away Democratic rule in states where that message was attractive, mainly (and not surprisingly) states that had been members of the former Confederacy. It found that this new orientation gave it disproportionate power in those states, whose legislatures it soon dominated. More importantly for the nation as a whole, it gained disproportionate power in the US Senate, where a few Red-State Republican Senators could kill or neutralize almost any legislation that threatened to extend the New Deal social and economic agenda of Franklin Roosevelt (their uber-villain).
For decades, this system worked remarkably well. Republicans were getting elected, Democrats were getting thwarted, rich donors were lavishly funding the Party, and think tanks like the Heritage Foundation were recruiting and training fresh generations of Republican office holders and ideologically-aligned judges. But underneath all the winning, trouble was brewing.
Republicans probably knew, but failed to appreciate, that racism is not a standalone attitude. It's part of a syndrome of related attitudes and beliefs. As traditional channels of communication between political leaders and their followers began to fragment with the arrival of social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, those attitudes and beliefs began to metastasize in ways the Party was finding hard to control. Racists were no longer just racists, easy to rile and quick to open their wallets to make sure black people we kept in "their place". They were now, thanks to decades of propaganda from the GOP and rightwing-media outlets, amplified and reinforced by the rage-inducing algorithms of social media, much more … deplorable: anti-immigrant, anti-minority, anti-equality, anti-science, anti-expertise, nativist, misogynist, and drained of empathy for anyone not sharing their racial or ethnic identity (source).
This might have been enough to allow Donald Trump to steal the GOP voting base in 2016, but there was one other factor that sealed the Party's fate: its acquiescence with the lie, feverishly promoted by Trump and Fox News, that Barack Obama was not a real American, was actually born in Kenya, and was possibly a Muslim "plant" spirited into the United States as an infant in order to win the Presidency 40 years later and usher in a Muslim theocracy to replace American democracy.
I believe this birtherism lie, and the enthusiasm with which it was embraced by Republican voters, led GOP leaders to realize two things. First, they discovered that their followers would believe anything, no matter how nonsensical, as long as it aligned with their feelings about how the world ought to be. To use Kahneman's terminology, they realized that most Republicans did not activate System 2 thinking when they were exposed to obvious lies that sounded too good to be true. And second, they realized that if their followers could believe this ridiculous lie, they could believe any lie the Party chose to tell them. And thus was born the Republican Party's abandonment of truth as a value to which it aspired, or as a criterion against which it would evaluate anything it communicated to its followers.
But Donald Trump, the most prolific and pathological liar ever to grace the American political stage, was one step ahead of the Party. He unleashed such a torrent of lies, conspiracies, and attention-grabbing insults that he quickly won over the gullible and "poorly educated" Republican base. Vanquishing more than a dozen establishment Republicans with ease, he captured the nomination and then, with a few vital assists from allies like Comey and Putin, the Presidency itself.
To the RNC, this looked like a winning strategy. Until it didn't. The problem, of course, was Trump himself. Party leaders began to suspect they had made a bad bet on Trump. They knew he was a serial liar and sexual predator, but their voters didn't seem to mind, so neither did they. But they quickly discovered, once Trump was in office for a few weeks, that he was also a moron, and not just any moron, but a spiteful, vengeful, vindictive, corrupt, and astonishingly self-destructive moron. But the base loved him. So the Party fell in line.
The Trump Administration quickly devolved into a tragedy wrapped in a comedy wrapped in a sad morality tale. The litany of disasters was truly epic: the failed Muslim ban, the failed border wall, the cynical tax break for the uber-rich, the botched COVID response, the horrors of child separation, the submissiveness to Putin, the criminal obstruction detailed in the Mueller Report, the "very fine people on both sides" in Charlottesville, the first impeachment, the January 6 riot, the second impeachment, and finally, the ignominious departure from office in January 2021.
The lies had turned into crimes, the crimes were turning into indictments, and the non-moron portion of the voting public was apparently beginning to notice — if not in their answers to polling questions, then in how they were starting to vote.
From the Party's point of view, it was Trump's electoral record that was most worrying. He lost the House in 2018, lost the Presidency in 2020, endorsed enough losers to leave the House with an ungovernably-thin majority in 2022, and has continued to endorse and elevate extremists in the 2024 GOP primaries, significantly eroding the Party's chances of making Congressional gains in 2024.
Even more ominously, the Party learned through these election cycles that Trump's MAGA base was not large enough to defeat Democrats in general elections in any but the most deeply-red states. Plus, MAGA was becoming a toxic brand and didn't seem to be growing. Facing this reality, Republican leaders had two choices: they could either revamp their agenda to attract more voters to their side, or they could attempt to overthrow the electoral system and establish a Russian-style one-party autocracy that would essentially render elections irrelevant. Amazingly, they chose the latter. They chose poorly.
The Republican National Committee (RNC) is now a fully-owned subsidiary of Donald Trump. Its leaders have been replaced by MAGA loyalists and Trump family members. Election denialism is now a prerequisite for employment at the RNC (source). "Traditional" conservatives like Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger have fled; they now wander the political landscape, homeless. Trump, in turn, is now busy sucking the Party dry, monopolizing its funding flow for his own purposes, alienating many of its biggest donors, and depriving down-ballot Republicans of the funding they need to compete successfully with much better-funded Democrats in key races across the country.
The Party now awaits its fate. Low on money, out of ideas, displaying ongoing dysfunction and in-fighting in Congress, inexplicably doubling down on its most unpopular policy positions, and formally bound to a soon-to-be convicted criminal and adjudicated rapist and business fraud, who also happens to suffer from a rapidly deteriorating mental state, the GOP has reached the end of its tenure as one of America's two great political parties. As Harvard political scientist Steven Levitsky has summarized the situation:
"between November 2020 and January 2021, the bulk of the Republican Party refused to accept defeat, refused to denounce violence, refused to break with openly anti-democratic extremism. From top to bottom, the Republican Party has ceased to be a loyal democratic party. (source)
Can American democracy survive its moron problem?
The Moron Machine appears to be self-destructing. This should not be too surprising, because it is now being run by the very morons it created. But even if the Moron Machine is no longer producing fresh waves of angry morons, even if the MAGA base is no longer growing, we still have 40 million or so morons — election deniers, conspiracy theorists, gun-nuts, and Trump worshippers — running free range over our political landscape. Can our democracy survive them?
I previously expressed some skepticism as to whether our government could survive the morons in our midst. I suggested that a healthy democracy could only function if all its political actors adhered to three principles: compromise, tolerance, and evidence-based reasoning. Clearly, today's Republican Party has abandoned all three, not to mention simple common decency. Its loyalty is now exclusively to Trump, not democracy, so its fate is inextricably tied to his. Should he somehow manage to win (or steal) the election this year, the Party will probably become his tribute-collector, funneling "donations" and "gifts" to the dictator's personal bank accounts. Should he fail, which seems much more likely, the Party's fate will depend on the severity and depth of the loss. I suspect the loss will be catastrophic and the Party will never recover. But this will depend on a down-ballot collapse that nobody is willing to predict today, with the possible exception of Simon Rosenberg.
Should Democrats win the Presidency in November, gain control of the House, and maintain control of the Senate, they will need to put in place strong policies and guardrails to ensure that a Trumpian insurrection can never happen again. Among the steps they will need to take, the following are crucial (see also this post):
- Eliminate the filibuster in the Senate.
- Pass and sign into law the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act and the Freedom to Vote Act.
- Pass a national women's healthcare bill that guarantees access to all reproductive services, including abortion, as a civil right for all Americans, wherever they live.
- Pass key reforms to strengthen democracy, lower the temperature of political discourse, and begin to transform America from a stumbling democracy to a functioning democracy with four very big but very important reforms: (1) depoliticize the Supreme Court, (2) strengthen protections against social media disinformation, (3) reinstate and extend the Fairness Doctrine to apply to cable news outlets, and (4) bypass if not eliminate the Electoral College.
- Finally, eliminate the corrosive role of big money in American politics: overturn Citizens United, increase transparency in campaign funding, limit the role of SuperPACs, and eliminate dark money contributions to political parties and candidates (some of these reforms are taken up in Freedom to Vote Act, but more radical reforms are needed to complete this critical task).
Assuming it's true that morons are made, not born, there is a possibility they can be unmade, or at least that we can stop breeding more of them. Much of our MAGA problem is generational. There is a cohort of angry old racist white men that will soon be dying off. We just need to be patient. Another part is structural. Much of Republican dominance in Red States has been achieved through cheating the system: gerrymandering, voter suppression, and voter intimidation. Deprived of those "advantages", Republicans would find it much harder to feed Trump's MAGA movement at scale.
Finally, the biggest source of our MAGA moron problem is educational. MAGA depends heavily on the poorly-educated. Every poll says so. This highlights how important it is to rededicate our public schools to teaching children how to think critically, reason effectively, and recognize bullshit when they see it. We can't allow Red State legislatures to turn schools into white supremacist indoctrination centers, where children are taught that slavery was a great way to learn valuable new skills. We need to make college and other forms of post-secondary education affordable and accessible to all. The best way to avoid becoming a moron in America is to get a quality education (should this be surprising?).
In order to address the disaffection and alienation that has driven so many Americans into the arms of Trump and his Republican enablers, we need to make the United States a fairer and more equal country. One recent study found that if the distribution of taxable income in the United States had remained constant at its 1975 level, by 2018 the bottom 90% of American income earners would have earned an additional $47–48 trillion between 1975 and 2018 (see also source). We can only ask ourselves how different this country would be if $50 trillion had been available to all working Americans over the last four decades, as opposed to being siphoned off and hoarded by the very rich.
Decreasing income and wealth inequality, thereby strengthening the economic prospects of middle-class and working-class Americans, will go a long way toward lowering the social anxiety that motivates many members of Trump's MAGA cult. Addressing their racism and other "deplorable" attitudes and beliefs may be a bigger challenge.
Whether the Democratic Party has the foresight, courage, and persistence to take on these radical reforms remains to be seen. In many ways, Democrats are just as dependent on the political status quo as Republicans. One way we can help them get over their own inertia is to recruit and vote for new and diverse voices, including young progressives with the energy and motivation to push the Democratic Party in the direction it needs to go.